10/09/2024

Church in the Wild: North Carolina, God,
and the Book of Job

Recently I visited my grandfather in North Carolina. As my brother and I shared a car, winding along the countless crooked spines of road that wind around the state's mountains, I found myself thinking of God. Ever since I was a little kid, the mountains of Appalachia always felt like God's home, beckoning me closer with furry green fingers and mist-heavy, sunset eyes. 

Even with the chapel at the top of the summer camp I grew up going to, I always found Him waiting in the open places: the fields, the forests, the lake. We built chapels for the people, God's house was already there. In the tender kiss of crickets and stars, in the quiet rush of wind over Carolina grass, it is easier to hear God's call.

Since I came back from that trip I've been going back to church. I've been answering the call of the red spruce and Fraser Firs, of the smoke-grey voice that rattles their leaves. As my brother and l wound our way back home to Georgia I felt myself straighten, the rosary of my vertebrae falling, uncoiling, and righting itself like the weight of the crucifix falling from my fist. I was heavy with new intent. God was there. He talked to me in the same language he always did: in unrest, in wind, in heavy, oil-black darkness.

Being back in a church, sitting in the bright wood pews, singing songs I thought I'd forgotten ages ago, was easier than I thought. I'd been praying the rosary and exploring my faith in smaller ways, but still worried that a church would be too great a step. But the prayers, the calls and response, the promises and offerings of the Eucharist had not changed.

Kneeling before the transubstantiated body of Christ and drinking the blood in a little, plastic, covid-conscious cup, felt like being saved again. Against the back of my neck, on my knees before the cross, I felt the wind of North Carolina on my neck.

My older friends, the ones who knew me before transition, are stunned when I tell them of this recent development. I was the kind of obnoxious atheist that read Christopher Hitchens and couldn't wait to rain on any faith-based parade. To them, it's as startling a conversion as Paul's on the road to Damascus. My ex-wife recently told me that of all the changes I've gone through, from gender to kink and polyamory and beyond, this newfound passion for Christ and God is the only one that truly threw her.

I don't know how to tell my friends, my family, that living within the mausoleum of my birth-gender was too dark to even hope for light. Walking around absolutely certain that my skin, my body, my name, my life was inexplicably and inextricably wrong was enough to convince me that faith was a luxury for other people. I didn't have the space to hope for a resurrection, for a greater faith. I wanted a life without witnesses. Whenever I let God into my life it resulted in terrible pain. 

When I was a counselor-in-training at the same Christian summer camp I'd been going to for eight years, I was entrusted with the care of a cabin full of boys. I would teach them fencing. I would teach them canoeing. I would lead them in prayer. I would do all of this while hiding from myself and feeling profoundly out of place at an all boys summer camp. I thought it was because I didn't believe at a Christian summer camp. It would be years before I realized the way my repressed transness played into my faith. I would spend night after night on the flat plateau of the soccer field and ask God why He closed my heart to Him.

Now that I am home in my body, I can let my spirit soar and seek and stumble and find without fear or shame. I can even listen to gospel music again without the sneering, self-effacing hard-heartedness I thought was protecting me.

Lately I've been reflecting on the folk hymn "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing." A staple at camp chapel service, the song's slow, simple melody has remained with me even when my faith did not. The lyrics, while listening to a Sufjan Stevens rendition, came back to me in a flood, perfectly. The song vacillates between unbridled love for God and a melancholy about the soul's wandering nature. It calls for song even as it sings. 

"Teach me some melodious sonnet sung by flaming tongues above" it cries, as though its simple human tones would be insufficient. So deep is the song's love. In the song's second verse it offers up the song as an offering. "Here I raise mine Ebenezer; hither by thy help I'm come; and I hope, by thy good pleasure; safely to arrive at home." An Ebenezer, or helping stone, was first raised by the prophet Samuel to commemorate God’s intercession in a battle. Standing amidst the smoking dark of a North Carolina night, I felt at home. I felt like the stone in the stillness, a monument to the God that brought me back safely from a decades-long battle to that moment, a son who fled His warmth and returned transfigured a daughter on fire with His love.

Writing about North Carolina's majesty and impact on me feels insurmountable right now. The entire state, particularly the city of Asheville, my beloved, licks its wounds after a devastating battle with hurricane Helene. Floods, power outages, and devastation pockmark the land that I love, the land that I believe closest to God. It would seem that God turned His eyes away from the land I love and left it at the mercy of the elements. Much of my heart lately has been occupied with reconciling that.

Last night I attended a Bible Study with some queer friends of mine. We were discussing the book of Job. Often misunderstood as a story of a man's dogged and illogically enduring love for a God that permits suffering, I came away from the text differently this time. God allows the Devil to test Job's faith by taking his children, his land, his health, and his joy. 

Throughout his ordeals, friends and learned men close to Job offer their advice and counsel: atone for your sins, understand that this suffering is part of God's plan, accept all this with tranquility. Job, shockingly, rebukes these friends and their advice. Job responds to one of these placating voices in Chapter 12:

"No doubt, but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you. But I have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?"

Job believes in a god that accepts his rage, his resentment, his outrage, and his hatred for his injustices. To try and rationalize or accept or moralize the random tragedies as part of God's will is to blaspheme. It is to assume knowledge of His will we cannot have. It is to lie with His tongue. 

To Job, cradling his dead children on his ruined land with his scabrous, boil-choked arms, there is no greater sin than to speak with God's mouth. To Job, the only faithful reaction to a God who would permit such horror is to hate Him. It is to rebuke Him and interrogate Him and curse Him. God allows this. We feel it and therefore it is within His will. Job's friends are fools to deny this humanity, the thing that sets us apart from all of nature.

I remember the wind of Carolina and the gentle kiss of God, and I hate the gails and rains that ruined lives, that will strand and leave people deserted and destitute. I remember the hymns in the hills and I curse these horrors with the same lungs. The God of my heart knows I will do this. He loves me still. He loves that I can hurt with those who are hurt.

A church that says otherwise knows not wisdom. A church that claims this is punishment or part of God's plan, that claims to find a lesson in this suffering, is a temple of idiots. Job, one of God's most beloved and faithful, lost everything and cursed his Father's name. I am no less His child for my hatred. I am no less His child for my grief.

Here are some links to charity efforts in North Carolina as they recover from Hurricane Helene.

I hope you will donate as you can.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B